Meredith Woerner

Your old Garbage Pail Kids cards could be worth an easy $4,000, thanks to runaway 1980s nostalgia. We recently spotted a Garbage Pail Kids card selling for a monstrous sum over at eBay.

What the hell is going on here? Are Garbage Pail Kids the next money-laundering scam the government hasn't picked up on yet? We know that the world was basically flooded with these farting, booger covered cutting tykes — so how are there rare, valuable ones? And just which cards are most likely to make you a fortune?

Thanks to the people behind the newly released Garbage Pail Kids book and Barren Aaron of GPKWorld.com, we've got a run down of the best of the worst. First up, the original, Adam Bomb.

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According to Aaron, like all things eBay, the $4,250 price for the iconic Garbage Pail Kid, Adam Bomb is a wee bit inflated. "I'm sure the sellers believe the pieces to be expensive, because that's the most iconic and popular GPK "ADAM Bomb." Whether or not this can really fetch so many zeroes remains to be seen.

But some of the international cards for ADAM are quite rare — especially the early test sets from Germany/Denmark, France/Belgium and Holland/Netherlands. Find those, and you can easily make a pretty penny — one Dutch Adam Bomb card recently sold for $97.34 also on eBay.

In fact, any of the early test set cards (should you spy them at your local flea market or garage sale) are exceptionally rare. Here's another example of Netherlands card with a different Kid.

The most sought-after GPK cards for collectors are the Japanese GPK cards, called the Bukimi Kun. Four single cards, with their wrapper, sold for $1,592.89 on eBay in February. Apparently the key is to have the wrapper, in excellent condition. Here's a collection of various international GPK cards you should keep an eye out for.

You may have noticed that various cards with the same art might have different names. Like Oak Kay, vs. Woody Allen as featured here. Complete sets of every single name attached to each piece of art can be difficult to find — but definitely not impossible. The real value is collecting all of them in one place.

And finally misprints, accidents and mistakes can be valuable — like for example, the die cut on Punch PERRY varies.

If you already have a complete collection hidden in your attic, put that stuff up for sale. Full sets of cards are selling for anything from $600 to $700.

And now, just for shits and grins, here's a collection of (what we deemed) to be the most disgusting Garbage Pail Kids cards ever made, from series 1 through 5. All of which make a cameo in the Garbage Pail Kids book.